Should the police be able to seize your property if you're accused of a crime?

The Supreme Court is currently considering the constitutionality of "civil forfeiture," the process in which law enforcement officials seize assets and property from citizens accused of a crime. Supporters of civil forfeiture say the system prevents criminals from profiting on their crimes. But opponents say police are far less likely to seize guns from criminal organizations than they are to seize much-needed assets from common people, and citizen have little recourse to get their property back -- even if charges are never filed. What do you think?

PERSPECTIVES

The case currently before the Supreme Court involves Tyson Timbs, an Indiana man who, in 2013, was busted for selling around $400 worth of heroin to undercover police officers. According to NPR:

Timbs pleaded guilty to one drug charge and was sentenced to a year of house arrest and five years of probation, plus $1,200 in fines and court fees.

But the state of Indiana wanted more. It wanted to keep the truck and sell it because it was used in the commission of a crime. The trial judge thought that was extreme and ruled that the state couldn't keep the truck. A court of appeals agreed that confiscating the truck was disproportionate. But the Indiana Supreme Court ruled that the Constitution's ban on excessive fines does not apply to the states. Timbs appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which hears arguments in his case today.

The Land Rover the state seized from Timbs is valued at $42,000, according to Slate, more than four times the maximum fine of $10,000 for Timbs' crime.

Every year, the federal and state governments obtain billions of dollars thanks to the work of prosecutors who expropriate property with some tenuous connection to a crime. Most states use the money to fund law enforcement, called policing for profit. Indiana also lets private attorneys file forfeiture claims against defendants, earning contingency fees and a share of the profit. That's what happened to Timbs -- so he sued, insisting that extreme forfeiture violates the Constitution. On Wednesday, the Supreme Court signaled that it agreed, with an unusual coalition of justices assailing the practice. A decision for Timbs could curb law enforcement abuses across the country, limiting one of the most scandalous components of our criminal justice system.

The issue of civil forfeiture is one that has united activists across the ideological spectrum. According to Slate:

[W]hile Gorsuch and Sotomayor led the fight on Wednesday, there's probably a cross-ideological coalition of justices prepared to invalidate excessive forfeitures. Such a ruling would reflect broad agreement across the ideological spectrum that forfeiture has gone too far. Among the organizations that wrote or joined amicus briefs supporting Timbs are the progressive ACLU and NAACP; the libertarian Cato and Goldwater institutes, as well as the Pacific Legal Foundation; the conservative Chamber of Commerce and Judicial Watch; and the fundamentalist Foundation for Moral Law, which is "dedicated to the defense of God-given liberties."

Criminal justice activists believe the practice unfairly targets those that cannot fight back. Unlike criminal seizures, people who have had their property taken via civil asset forfeiture do not have a right to an attorney. As Chris Ingraham wrote for The Washington Post, "Why spend $20,000 on a lawyer over a $5,000 seizure?"

Conservative pundit George Will wrote in an op-ed for the Washington Post that civil seizures are obviously abused and should be abolished.

In determining when fines are excessive, courts must adopt something akin to Justice Potter Stewart's famous axiom concerning obscenity : You know excessiveness when you see it. Justices who fancy themselves "originalists" should acknowledge that those who wrote and ratified the Bill of Rights understood that courts were going to have to give content to the concept of excessiveness (as well as to cruelty and unusualness in punishments, and unreasonableness regarding searches and seizures, and other open-textured constitutional language). Doing so is not judicial "activism"; it is judging. Failing to do so is a dereliction of the duty to enforce constitutional guarantees.

Civil forfeiture recently had a supporter high up in the Justice Department: Jeff Sessions has long been a vocal supporter of the practice. Before his ignominious ouster from his position as Attorney General, in July 2017, Sessions supported civil forfeiture during a speech to law enforcement officials. Per The Washington Post:

As any of these law enforcement partners will tell you and as President Trump knows well, civil asset forfeiture is a key tool that helps law enforcement defund organized crime, take back ill-gotten gains, and prevent new crimes from being committed, and it weakens the criminals and the cartels. Even more importantly, it helps return property to the victims of crime. Civil asset forfeiture takes the material support of the criminals and instead makes it the material support of law enforcement, funding priorities like new vehicles, bulletproof vests, opioid overdose reversal kits, and better training. In departments across this country, funds that were once used to take lives are now being used to save lives.

Slate reports that, on its face, civil forfeiture makes sense as a way to prevent organized criminals from profiting from their crimes:

Ever since the federal government started participating in civil asset forfeiture at the height of the drug war in the 1980s, the argument in favor of the practice has been that criminals shouldn't be allowed to benefit from money they've earned by committing crimes (e.g., selling drugs). Through equitable sharing, local and state police can invite a federal law enforcement agency -- usually either the Drug Enforcement Administration or Customs and Border Protection -- to take over a case, seize any assets associated with it, and "share" a large portion of the haul (up to 80 percent) with the agency that brought it the case. According to the New Yorker's Sarah Stillman, proceeds from civil forfeiture soared from $27 million in 1985, a year after the passage of the Comprehensive Crime Control Act, to $4.2 billion in 2012.

In theory, it's a clever and morally righteous idea: get drug kingpins to pay for public safety.

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